My surprise afternoon with the MTBoS and MAA President Francis Su

The NCTM annual meeting was in Boston earlier this week. I’d reached out to Fawn Nguyen and Dan Anderson to grab lunch since we’d never met in person, and we eventually decided to meet at the MTBoS booth at the end of the conference. The choice to meet there led to several amazingly fun and lucky breaks.

One was that I got to meet many of the people who share great math on Twitter including Tina Cardone, Justin Lanier, Jasmine Walker, and, since this was the Math Twitter Blog-o-Sphere, here’s one twitter handle only just for fun: @Mythagon.

Another great thing that happened was that Francis Su, the president of the Mathematical Association of America, happened to stop by the booth at roughly the same time I showed up. I don’t know what (if any) connection there is between the MAA and the NCTM, and maybe the MAA’s president is at the NCTM annual meeting every year, but I thought it was pretty cool to see him there interacting with so many math teachers. Tina Cardone gave him a copy of her book – Nix the Trix – which is a sensational example of teachers working together online to improve math education. He seemed genuinely interested and I really hope he enjoys reading through it.

We all ended up going to lunch together and Francis and I ended up talking about several of the amazing math resources that are on line for both pre-college math and popular math (for lack of a better phrase).

I mentioned seeing a Numberphile piece in which Ed Frenkel lays out his vision of math education and then seeing Dan Anderson’s amazing “My Favorite” blog post. I wrote about both of those things here:

Obviously Fawn Nguyen’s writing (and tweeting!) has been hugely influential to me. Her twist on the classic picture frame problem was one of the first things that I saw from her and I was absolutely blown away:

With all of the amazing sharing from teachers online, I guess it isn’t so surprising that the project that I did with my kids today came out of that post-lunch conversation with Fawn at the conference center:

After discussing the sharing from teachers, we talked about some of the great accessible / popular math that is being shared online right now, too. Numberphile, for example is doing an amazing job. Their presentation about the Pythagorean theorem with Harvard’s Barry Mazur, for example, is incredible:

Their video about the sum 1 + 2 + 3 + . . . . is one of the most viewed math videos anywhere online:

Of course, the popular sharing often has quite a bit of overlap with what many teachers are sharing. One of our first blog projects was inspired by a Numberphile video shared by Dan Anderson that reminded me of an old Patrick Honner blog post:

Finally, there are some great popular math talks by some really famous mathemtaticians, too. Terry Tao’s “Cosmic Distance Ladder” presentation at the Museum of Math is an absolute must watch and inspired 3 different projects with the boys. It is incredible to me that this Terry Tao lecture has been seen only 2,500 times:

So, a super lucky day for me yesterday meeting so many of the teachers that I follow on twitter, meeting Francis Su, and then spending the rest of the afternoon talking with Fawn and still more teachers. What a great day to have been in Boston!